Humanity is facing a challenge unlike any we've ever had to confront. We are in an unprecedented period of change. Exponential growth is causing an already huge human population to double in shorter and shorter time periods.
When I was born in 1936, just over two billion people lived on the planet. It's astounding that the population has increased more then threefold within my lifetime. That staggering growth has been accompanied by even steeper increases in technological innovation, consumption, and a global economy that exploits the entire planet as a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for toxic emissions and waste.
We have become a new kind of biological force that is altering the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. Indeed, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has suggested that the current geologic period should be called the Anthropocene Epoch to reflect our new status as a global force -- and a lot of scientists agree.
As noted in a recent Economist article, "Welcome to the Anthropocene," we are altering the Earth's carbon cycle, which leads to climate change, and we have sped up by more than 150 percent the nitrogen cycle, which has led to acid rain, ozone depletion, and coastal dead zones, among other impacts. We have also replaced wilderness with farms and cities, which has had a huge impact on biodiversity.
On top of that, according to the Economist, a "single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth -- twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year." As for those global sediment flows, the article goes on to point out that they have been cut by nearly a fifth, eroding the Earth's deltas "faster than they can be replenished," thanks to the almost 50,000 large dams built in the world over the past half-century.
We now occupy every continent and are exploring every nook and cranny of the Earth for new resources. The collective ecological impact of humanity far exceeds the planet's capacity to sustain us at this level of activity indefinitely. Studies suggest it now takes 1.3 years for nature to restore what humanity removes of its renewable resources in a year, and this deficit spending has been going on since the 1980s.
For the first time in human history, we have to respond as a single species to crises of our own making. Until now, this kind of unified effort only happened in science fiction when space aliens invaded Earth. In those stories, world leaders overcame human divisions to work together against the common enemy.
Now, as comic strip character Pogo said in the '70s (appropriately, on a poster created for Earth Day): "We have met the enemy and he is us." Humans have long been able to affect the environment, but never before on such a scale. In the past, even people with primitive tools and weapons had impacts on local flora and fauna, as Tim Flannery outlined in The Future Eaters, and Jared Diamond described in Collapse. Diminishing resources forced people to come to grips with the need to sustain their resources or to move in search of new opportunities.
The only way to come to grips with the crises and find solutions is to understand that we are biological creatures, with an absolute need for clean air, clean water, clean food and soil, clean energy, and biodiversity. Capitalism, communism, democracy, free enterprise, corporations, economies, and markets do not alter those basic needs. After all, those are human constructs, not forces of nature. Similarly, the borders we throw up around our property, cities, states, and countries mean nothing to nature.
All the hopes that meetings such as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the climate conferences in Kyoto in 1997, Copenhagen in 2009, and Cancun in 2010 would help us resolve major ecological challenges will be dashed as long as we continue to put economic and political considerations above our most fundamental biological, social, and spiritual needs. We humans may be heavy hitters, but we must remember that nature bats last.
A Christian Response to Overpopulation
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'We will solve problems around food and population from the bottom up'
Everything intends to "do us in".
Suzuki and his compatriots in eco-religion want strict human micro-management of nature, in order to even govern nature, as well as humanity. This is exactly the hijacking of communism under a bourgeoisie driven bureaucracy that Karl Marx warned about.
What is the alternative, which actually supports humanity, as well as nature? Read what Julian Simon presented. Human ingenuity and creativity is Earths greates resource. Nature itself is the ultimate example of how well a libertarian free market functions. The Julian Simon website:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
To close, there was a question Trivial Pursuit game about what creature has had the biggest impact on the change of nature in North America. The correct answer is the common Beaver.
It's not the David Suzukis and Mathis Wackernagels who will have to downscale their standards of living by 99 percent. It's the rest of us. They don't even think that they are the global elite, as they fly, drive, breed, live, and consume to their hearts' content.
In all my years tincupping for bling at big eco foundations, I never saw a project that revolved around the eco-elite slashing THEIR carbon footprints. The "Ecological Footprint" project is constantly sending out e-mails inviting people to jet off to faraway places...so they can all sit in resorts and discuss how to force EVERYBODY ELSE to consume less.
It's like the ultimate religion: how can one dissent from power/control exerted To Save The Earth? That's kicking baby seals--even worse than, say, mere satanism.
Trivial Pursuit is an odd choice--and framing--of a fact in the present context. Such glibness is too easily argued against or dismissed to take seriously. Also it invokes the sort of mathematical and factual illiteracy with which the environmental movement's communicators are so often infected. But I do agree very strongly, from experience, that many "environmentalists" are just priests and kings in organic tencel.
Germany and Switzerland are getting bad advice from the environmentalists. The gas and coal companies in Russia and Poland love Germany's recent decision. The US has over 1000 coal plants and tens of thousands of natural gas wells all creating CO2 or methane and other pollutants. Follow George Monbiot. He's one of a growing number of Environmentalists who also support nuclear. Energy literacy means knowing nuclear energy is the best solution.
Due to our collective inability to act, the global environment has since been in a downward spiral and as many scientists will admit in private, the best we can now do -- and only if everybody worldwide (business, government, ordinary folks) act as one -- is borrow a few extra decades before the results of our folly are obvious to all and finally overtake us. We have passed the tipping point after which life as we have known it cannot be restored for thousands of years.
However, there is always a chance that post-Anthropocene, the planet will repair itself more quickly -- but post-Antropocene means after mankind is no longer a major force of any kind just as mythology says occurred for thousands of years post-Atlantis but which we obviously didn't learn from; if Atlantis was more than just a legend passed down by its survivors to warn us about what might happen again if we repeated our past mistakes afterwhich we will not be given another chance.
I and my household have slashed our fossil energy use in the past 11 years. I haven't flown at all in that time; my partner, four times for work (required to keep the job), and within the region. He walks to and from work. Our direct fossil carbon emission budget is a ton. And so on. And so forth.
It can be done. But so long as people like David Suzuki get paid megabucks, and paid major attention, for a bunch of honking rather than action, then people can keep avoiding the issue of their own consumption, refusing to make behavioral changes, and bickering over technofixes.
I'm of the view that so-called environmentalist pundits should have to display their carbon footprint at the bottom of everything they write.
We've come a long way in dealing with the environment over the decades. Both air and water pollution have vastly improved in many jurisdictions. It would be useful hearing these stories, and why they were successes.
What's more, it's demoralizing hearing nothing but doom, doom, doom. People should know that successes are not just possible, but common.
http://thinkingaboot.blogspot.com/2011/06/it-soon-really-will-be-electric-avenue.html
I just hope there is enough of the nature I have grown to love left to run for home.
until knowledge and commonsense overcome greed and stupidity...Nature must defend herself !!!!!